"Matthew Woodring Stover - Clone Wars - Shatterpoint" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stover Matthew Woodring)

hand. "-you, Master Yoda." Yoda rocked back on his hover chair and made the rustling snuffle that
served him for a laugh. "No politician am I, foolish one." He still occasionally spoke as though Mace
were a student. Mace didn't mind. It made him feel young. Everything else these days made him feel old.
Yoda's laughter faded. "And no fit leader for this Republic would I be." He lowered his voice even
further, to barely above a whisper. "Clouded by darkness are my eyes; the Force shows me only
suffering, and destruction, and the rise of a long, long night. Better off without the Force, leaders perhaps
are; able to see well enough, young Palpatine seems." 'Young" Palpatine-who had at least ten years on
Mace, and looked twice that-chose that moment to enter the room, accompanied by another man. Yoda
stepped down from his hoverchair. Mace rose in respect. The Jedi Masters bowed, greeting the
Supreme Chancellor with their customary formality. He waved the courtesies aside. Palpatine looked
tired: flesh seemed to be dissolving beneath his sagging skin, deepening his already hollowed cheeks.

The man with Palpatine was hardly larger than a boy, though clearly well past forty; lank, thinning brown
hair draped a face so thoroughly undistinguished that Mace could forget it the instant he glanced away.
His eyes were red-rimmed, he held a cloth handkerchief to his nose, and he looked so much like some
minor bureaucratic functionary-a clerk in a dead-end government post, with job security and absolutely
nothing else-that Mace automatically assumed he was a spy.

'We have news of Depa Billaba." Despite his earlier reasoning, the simple sadness in the Chancellor's
voice sent Mace's stomach plummeting.

'This man has just come from Haruun Kal. I'm afraid-well, perhaps you should simply examine the
evidence for yourself." 'What is it?" Mace's mouth went dry as ash. "Has she been captured?" The
treatment a captured Jedi could expect from Dooku's Separatists had been demonstrated on Geonosis.

'No, Master Windu," Palpatine said. "I'm afraid-I'm afraid it's quite a bit worse." The agent opened a
large travelcase and produced an old-fashioned holoprojector. He spent a moment fiddling with controls,
and then an image bloomed above the mirror-polished ebonite that served as Palpatine's desk.

Yoda's ears flattened, and his eyes narrowed to slits.

Palpatine looked away. "I have seen too much of this already," he said.

Mace's hands became fists. He couldn't seem to get his breath.

The shimmering corpses were each the size of his finger. He counted nineteen. They looked human, or
close to it. There was a scatter of prefabricated huts, blasted and burned and broken.

The ruins of what must have once been a stockade wall made a ring around the scene. The jungle that
surrounded them all stood four decimeters high, and covered a meter and a half of Palpatine's desk.

After a moment, the agent sniffled apologetically. "This is-er, seems to be-the work of Loyalist partisans,
under the command of Master Billaba." Yoda stared.

Mace stared.

There-those wounds. Mace needed a better view. When he reached into the jungle, his hand crawled
with the bright ripples of the holoprojector's scanning-matrix lasers. "These." He passed his hand through
a group of three bodies that gaped with ragged wounds.